Doomed UN Climate Summit in Durban Ridiculed as “Science” Crumbles

No members of Congress or President Obama’s cabinet bothered to show up at this year’s United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa. Attendance at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17), meanwhile, was down about 70 percent from the 2009 global-warming conference. And the media said very little about the gathering.

But as the “science” continues to crumble, critics of UN global-warming theories are still on the march despite essentially proclaiming victory. Activists literally parachuted into Durban with banners hailing “Climategate 2.0.” The growing scandal surrounding embarrassing climate e-mails leaked just before the summit has largely overshadowed the climate talks themselves.

"Media covering COP17 are kidding themselves if they think they can ignore and wish away Climategate 2.0," said Executive Director Craig Rucker of the liberty-minded environmental group Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which helped organize the skydiving operation to “wake up this conference and place the Climategate evidence of corrupted science where the world must see it."

This week, in the wake of Climategate 2.0, the lone GOP presidential hopeful clinging to UN theories, Jon Huntsman, finally jumped ship too. “The scientific community owes us more in terms of a better description of explanation about what might lie beneath all of this,” Huntsman said, adding that there was not enough information to formulate policy right now and that there are “questions about the validity of the science” raised by the Climategate e-mails.

Some prominent U.S. lawmakers, meanwhile, celebrated recent developments. U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a fierce critic of UN climate alarmism, sent a video to be presented at the global body’s climate summit that all but officially pronounces the death of the alarmist movement.

The climate charade has “completely collapsed” after suffering a “scientific death of a thousand cuts,” Inhofe noted, saying he wished he could be in Durban to celebrate the “final nail in the coffin” of global-warming hysteria. And the world knows the jig is up.

“The message from Washington to the UN delegates in South Africa this week could not be any clearer: you are being ignored,” Sen. Inhofe said in the video. “And you are being ignored by your biggest allies in the United States: President Obama and the Democratic leadership in the Senate.” (The video is embedded at the end of this article.)

Inhofe said the so-called “cap-and-trade” regime would have been the biggest tax increase in U.S. history, so its final defeat is good news for regular people. “This victory is especially important today, as families in America and around the world continue to face tough economic times,” he said. “Tossing out any remote possibility of a U.N. global warming treaty is one of the most important things we can do for the economy.”

In 2009, Obama, Al Gore, and a collection of alarmist democrat lawmakers traveled to the COP15 in Copenhagen to announce that the U.S. government would join the UN in creating a global cap-and-trade scheme. Sen. Inhofe also appeared, but to tell the assembled governments and climate dignitaries that the U.S. Senate would never consent.

“I was right and they were wrong,” Inhofe noted. “Nevertheless, President Obama and his allies in the far-left environmental movement are working under the radar to impose global-warming restrictions in the United States through regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency.”

Making matters worse, Inhofe said, was that Obama was moving forward with the economy-destroying rules using theories from the “now-discredited” UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And while cap and trade might be dead once and for all, the cabal that advanced it is still around plotting its next move.

"The real agenda of the climate alarmists is to promote massively expanded government regulation worldwide, at the expense of jobs creation and economic growth,” noted CFACT chief Rucker. “The policies they advocate will do the greatest harm to the world's poorest people and ensure that citizens of developing nations have no chance at true freedom and prosperity."

But while governments seeking carbon taxes or climate booty from rich nations continue their frantic efforts to save the climate talks, most have given up — at least for now. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol climate agreement is set to expire next year as well, and it appears almost certain that it will die before a successor arrives on the scene.

Even UN boss Ban Ki-moon essentially conceded defeat temporarily, admitting that there would be no binding treaty emerging from the COP17. "We must be realistic about expectations for a breakthrough in Durban," he declared on Tuesday as governments squabbled over “emissions limits” and whose taxpayers would pay how much to whom. "The ultimate goal for a comprehensive and binding climate-change agreement may be beyond our reach for now."

However, even as a solid climate agreement eludes negotiators, there is a possibility that some important measures could still emerge from the conference by the final day. Among other proposals, global taxes on shipping to fund international bodies and handing out money to regimes ruling less-developed countries are being seriously discussed.

And progress is also being made on deciding a date by which a “binding” world agreement should be forged. "We're not setting a hard target on this date ... [but] 2015 would be a reasonable target to set to pull together any new climate change regime," Canadian Environment chief Peter Kent told reporters. "If we can reach one before 2015, that would be good, if it takes somewhat longer, that would be fine ... but we can't leave Durban without a firm agreement." Others agreed.

Meanwhile, a report released on December 8 by Climate Depot has shattered the myth of “consensus” on UN global-warming theories. Signed by over 1,000 scientists from around the world including many current and former IPCC scientists, the document and the statements contained within it are proving to be extraordinarily embarrassing to the tax-funded alarmists in Durban.

“Despite what you may have heard in the media, there is nothing like a consensus of scientific opinion that this is a problem,” explained the IPCC's Tom Tripp, who served on the UN climate body since 2004 and is listed as one of the lead authors. “Because there is natural variability in the weather, you cannot statistically know for another 150 years.”

Many other experts quoted in the report reached even more damning conclusions. “Any reasonable scientific analysis must conclude the basic theory wrong!!” wrote NASA Scientist Dr. Leonard Weinstein, who currently serves as a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace. Hundreds of other respected scientists offered similar assertions.

But even as many scientists say the climate “scam” is unraveling, analysts noted that the vested interests would not be disappearing without a long and hard fight. Researchers on the taxpayer dole, dictators seeking handouts, Western governments looking for new revenue streams, global bureaucrats after more power, and many others all depend on the perpetuation of alarmism.

There are literally trillions of dollars at stake. And if the global-warming crusade publicly implodes, it will all come crashing down. Plus, the next UN scheme will be much harder to market.

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